About

Philip Jett grew up in a town in northwest Tennessee boasting fewer than three hundred residents. His father was a television repairman in the days of transistors and vacuum tubes and his mother a homemaker. As his high school’s valedictorian, Jett decided that the farm or the factory was not for him so he set out in search of a higher education. Eight years later, he was living in Manhattan, having graduated from college and law school with honors and a master of laws degree.

When family and other commitments necessitated his return to Tennessee, Jett joined what at that time was the state’s largest law firm. As a corporate and tax attorney, Jett represented multinational corporations, CEOs, and celebrities from the music, television, and sports industries. He made court appearances, drafted federal tax legislation, lobbied Congress, wrote legal works that garnered citations as authority on various subjects, and spoke on numerous legal topics at conferences and seminars. Jett didn’t realize it, but he was honing many of the skills that make a good writer – investigative research, analytical reasoning, resourcefulness, determination, and vision.

After almost twenty years of long hours with little time for family and friends, and with his health taking a beating, Jett decided it was time to stop chasing the billable hour and retire from the practice of law. Without the demands and stresses of a legal practice, Jett discovered a new, more flexible life, filled with coaching his sons’ baseball and football teams, volunteering for children’s causes, and pursuing his new love, writing. With an idea and an outline, he found that writing stories was much more enjoyable than drafting the lengthy and tedious contracts, trusts, briefs, and tax appeals that he often considered dull and dreary.

Not long afterward, he wrote his first novel, See You in Possum Trot, for his family, cataloging his childhood in the small Tennessee town during the turbulent and outlandish 1960s, with much embellishment and fun. When friends and family enthusiastically told him how much they enjoyed the book, he decided to take writing seriously.

Jett decided on his next project, the narrative nonfiction book, The Death of an Heir: Adolph Coors III and the Murder that Rocked an American Brewing Dynasty, based on the 1960 kidnapping and murder of Coors Brewing Company CEO and Chairman, Adolph Coors III. DEATH OF AN HEIR spans thirteen months during 1960 and 1961, providing the writer an opportunity to delve into the thoughts and actions of the hunter and the hunted with not only factual accuracy and depth, but with a mood of anticipation and mystery that will bind the reader until the book’s end. The book’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, has called it “an amazing work, both in terms of history and crime.”

Before the ink had dried, Jett began researching and writing an untold and gripping story of greed and cruelty that involves the kidnapping and murder of another high-profile person. He is excited with what’s unfolding on paper and is sure you will be, too.

When he’s not researching and writing books, Jett participates in many writing activities, including the Nashville Writers' Council that he founded. His greatest passion, however, is volunteering for children’s causes. And with one son in college and another in high school, you no longer will find him coaching youth baseball and football or helping out at the local school. Instead, you may find him on the golf course, in the gym, sailing, or . . . in the library.